He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography: For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.īernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. ![]() When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas to the fullest extent possible. In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. Bernays’ ideas sold a lot more than cigarettes and Dixie cupsĮven though Bernays saw the power of propaganda during war and used it to sell products during peacetime, he couldn’t have imagined that his writings on public relations would become a tool of the Third Reich. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink. For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. These were designed to prove that Ivory bars were more buoyant than competing products.īernays also used fear to sell products. To convince kids that bathing could be fun, he sponsored soap sculpture competitions and floating contests. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.īernays used the same techniques on children. When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit. In the 1930s, he promoted cigarettes as both soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows. He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.” With Bernays’ help, Coolidge won the 1924 election.īernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To counteract President Coolidge’s stiff image, Bernays organized “pancake breakfasts” and White House concerts with Al Jolson and other Broadway performers. ![]() Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”ĭrawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.īernays acquired an impressive list of clients, ranging from manufacturers such as General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, to media outlets like CBS and even politicians such as Calvin Coolidge. Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. But instead of farming, he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe. The year after his birth, the Bernays family moved to New York, and Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha. Born in Austria in 1891, the year Sigmund Freud published one of his earliest papers, Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. ![]() chrisch_, CC BY-NCīernays came by his beliefs honestly.
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